Monday, October 30, 2006

Statements

Why does anyone drive a Hummer? It's expensive to buy, and, once bought, expensive to operate. It performs absolutely and utterly no function that couldn't be performed better and more cheaply by an SUV, a minivan, or a truck. There is, in fact, only one reason to drive a Hummer:

To make a statement.

What kind of statement, you ask? Well, the fact is, it's a statement that goes something like this: "I have no perspective and no sense, I'm simply given to reckless and wanton excess." But of course that's not the statement that Hummer people think they are making. In their oblivious heads, this is how they think their statement sounds: "I'm brave and tough, I get the job done, and I have a big dick."

"Gregory," I can hear you asking, "why do you feel as though you have to post about this particular subject right now?" I'm glad you asked. I was stopped at a traffic light this past weekend. I was in the rightmost lane. A vehicle pulled up beside me in the left lane. My eye was caught by a ripple of reflected flashes. I looked over and saw...

...a Hummer with wire-spoke wheels.

Wire-spoke wheels. You know, the kind of wheels you see on British or Italian sports cars that are small and have feminine curves and masculine power and whip around mountain-road turns snapping heads with their g-forces while their tyres press the road like lovers having sex. Those wheels.

On a Hummer.

Ack! It was like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in a short flirt-skirt and a spaghetti-strap, midriff-revealing halter top. In other words, it was something I so never wanted to see.

I'm not sure I've recovered even yet.

But while I'm on the subject, what's with this new Hummer, the baby Hummer, the H3? In the commercials for the H3, a guy's standing in a gas station parking lot and waving to H3's as they drive buy. He calls out stuff like, "Don't stop this time!", "See ya later!", and "Maybe next time!" The point is to emphasize what the commercial says is something "they said couldn't be done," i.e., make a Hummer that gets (please sit down, in case this news makes your knees weak) twenty miles to the gallon. On the highway.

But to me, what the commercial really says -- covertly, but the message is there, as this guy celebrates that the new H3 can pass a gas station by -- is that the old H1 and H2 are such dinosaurs that they literally have to stop at each gas station they pass, just as a caravan crossing the desert must stop for provisions at every oasis, and that if they didn't, if they passed up just one gas station, they'd end up immobilized by the side of the road, gasping for fuel, and see how I managed to mix dinosaur and camel metaphors in the same incredible run-on sentence?

But, dear reader, this is the real question regarding the H3: If the only earthly purpose for owning a Hummer is to make a statement, then what kind of statement is the H3 driver making? Something like... "I wish I was brave and tough, and I wish I could get the job done, and I wish I had a big dick, but this was all I could afford"?

People, if you want to drive a Hummer...

...join the Army. And, while you're there, as an extra added bonus, you'll get to actually demonstrate that you're brave and tough, and show everyone that you can get the job done.